Flash Fiction 55 Special April Edition #2

Since April is still poetry month as long as there are poets to celebrate it, here is the second special April edition of the 55 for all who are still valiantly writing daily, or for those who just wish to practice the form. Grab your pen, your paper, your keyboard, your crayons or whatever suits your fancy, and write 55 words, no more, no less, of poetry, prose-poetry or flash fiction, and post the link to your results in the comments below.

The prompt will be live from Friday midnight to Sunday at 4 PM.

~*~

Here is my 55:

Masque

"..and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

You, two

beats behind the living morning.

I, the rusted

 cutthroat knife flower.

You, in

 the scorpion cave torn, and

I,

anchoress in the black bower.

We dance

a chanted nightmare leaking fire

masked with

green locusts buzzing desire.

Outside, we

think the red death passes blind

these chambers

where our bones will rest entwined.

April 2020







with a nod to Imaginary Gardens with Real ToadsFriday April 10 Play it Again: Odilon Redon

Image: Photo, author unknown   via internet   Fair Use

The Masque of The Red Death, © Odilon Redon, 1883  Public Domain

The Fickle Selkie

 

The Fickle Selkie

You came in on the wave

you left on,

dripping sleek and strong 

your secrets wearied in the foam.

You opened wide

your kelp drift eyes 

so I could see 

timelessly

the sea you plowed so long

 without a harvest

richer than sing-song.

We waltzed the wrecks

on dead men's bones,

and of 

the everything we found
we carried
nothing home.

I should have known

you'd leave as quick

as sea fret wrack

without a sound.

You are

nothing to me now---

your joys or griefs,

your warmth that fades

in the windy days

of a landsman's chill,

nothing at all of sea or land

less than the

 fine dust that seeps a sand

between lid and eye

to stab each blink,

an almost-nothing soon gone
in the rub of tears.

You are

nothing to me now

nothing, 

nothing at all--

no scrimshaw kiss

no oceanic salt-lick--

only a bit of bric-

a-brac decor,

the mounted skull

beside the door

of some strayed herbivore

who met its end in heat and thirst,

bleached and white and empty-eyed,

ant-cleaned of all the tasty worst.

Outside the walls

I cannot hear

the wave that crashes on

 your name
circling spray 

in wraithlike wreaths

around my lambent chimney tor, 

the smoke of cedars
 upward taking blind

into nothing

the burn of the soft wet skin
you left behind.

~September, 2015 

"Selkies ...are mythological creatures found in Scottish, Irish, [Icelandic] and Faroese folklore... Selkies are said to live as seals in the sea but shed their skin to become human on land."

~wikipedia

Image: Näcken (The Water Sprite), 1882 by Ernst Josephson, public domain via wikimedia commons

Pictures of a Failed Exhibition

Pictures Of A Failed Exhibition

From the days of my religion

when men were gods

and trees were prophets

painted tall and straight

till the  witches'-broom showed,

I took nothing in the end

but the relic in the bone box

framed by black velvet,
lid so carefully carved

with all my fables.

I set it on a scarlet altar

with seven priests and seven 

blessings, where canvas cherubim 

genuflected with a smirk.
In times of great need, I took it out.

I overlooked its sour smell,

its shriveled  form, and

fervently adored it as I

prayed its intercession
in my damnation.

But each year it just

grew blacker, crackled, smaller,

till opening the casket one day

I saw only a brimstone dust.

Then the incubus came

to please and torment me,

the spoiled trees

were felled, the priests

unfrocked and the cherubim fled,
never having truly felt at home

All that was left
hanging in the chiaroscuro
at the alter was a memory-shadow
shape of a severed thing decayed

pointing out the way

to dissolution. From these pictures
I learned two things:

that evil is good's bad dream;

that evil is insane

for it cannot dream at all.

~June 2015

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Fireblossom Friday

The perpetual framer of original challenges, Fireblossom (Shay's Word Garden) asks us to write a poem on any subject, her sole stricture being that the title begin with the words 'Pictures of..." 

Optional Psychedelic Garage Band Accompaniment

Process note: "...witch's broom or witches' broom is a disease or deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird's nest..."~wikipedia

Iamges: The Relic, 18923, by Joaquin Sorolla

Public domain via wikiart.org

Witch's-broom on Birch, via wikimedia commons

Shared under a Creative Commons license